Thursday, March 28, 2019
Friday, March 22, 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Monday, March 18, 2019
Incuriouser and Incuriouser
Several community leaders of the Ferguson BLM riots are dead, and so is journalism, as this report evidences:
Two young men were found dead inside torched cars. Three others died of apparent suicides. Another collapsed on a bus, his death ruled an overdose.
Six deaths, all involving men with connections to protests in Ferguson, Missouri, drew attention on social media and speculation in the activist community that something sinister was at play.
Police say there is no evidence the deaths have anything to do with the protests stemming from a white police officer's fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown and that only two were homicides. But activists and observers remain puzzled, especially since people involved in the protests continue to face harassment and threats.Jim Salter of ABC News offers no evidence of said harassment--presumably because he's taking the word of "activist and observers". This last sentence suggests but doesn't say they're the source--the second clause stands as an independent observation. Deliberate or sloppy, I don't know.
Jim is admirably narrative-compliant, but not too curious. The deaths may very well be related to the protests, but in a very non-narrative-compliant way. Jim is looking for the racist bogey in between the elephant and 800-pound gorilla in the room.
Three factors loom large. First, by far, the inundation of Ferguson with money from national organizations, including of course Soros' 33 million, much of it landing in the hands of young black men with little preparation and often questionable character, only recently recruited to the cause.
Secondly there is the Ferguson Effect, with cops sensibly withdrawing on the streets and crime increasing (probably still in effect).
Thirdly the loot from the riots, which afterward had to be fenced, traded, stolen a second time and consumed, including a load of pharmaceuticals looted from the CVS the revolutionaries seized first. Radio stations are so passe.
Beefs over the Soros spoils may explain the murders--I have a hard time imagining you dump a pallet of money in front of the ghetto-yokels of Ferguson and it gets distributed sensibly.
The suicides strike me as less suspicious--what I can imagine is the despondence of one of these poor souls after the money and attention runs out.
But we'll never know. Unless of course it turns out some rogue cops or secret white nationalist underground are on the job. I almost welcome the break from the monotony of the Narrative.
Broadcast Note
Wednesday, March 20, at about noon Pacific Time, I'm doing another livestream breakfast interview with James LaFond, on my YouTube channel.
James' latest is Cracker-Boy: A History of Plantation America: 1607-1865, available in paperback from Amazon. Here's the blurb:
Help out this awful interviewer by coming along and asking some questions.
James' latest is Cracker-Boy: A History of Plantation America: 1607-1865, available in paperback from Amazon. Here's the blurb:
In this in-depth survey of Plantation America, the author brings to light the conditions of life for the millions of forgotten and dismissed Americans, many of them malnourished child slaves, who were literally planted as human cattle in a pristine land in a desperate bid to transform it into a taxable mercantile garden. Such facts as the holding of Chinese and Southeast Asian slaves in Maryland in the early 1700s and the frequency with which runaways stole from their masters or were shackled are illuminated in this chronicle of the Actual Plantation America, which should put forever to rest the venerated lie of Colonial America.James has done extensive work on the subject of white bondage in colonial and antebellum America.
Help out this awful interviewer by coming along and asking some questions.
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Tent Show Revival
"Anyone seen my collar?"
Danny frowned at the silent room.
"Bastards."
John's chin nestled neatly into his wattles as he squinted at the wig he was turning about in his lap.
"I haven't." He managed, somehow, through the tiered mass of compressed flesh.
Eddie, sewing a pair of lederhosen, grunted negative through teeth holding a thread tight.
Danny glimpsed himself in the old burlesque mirror. The white greasepaint left behind in the crevices around his eyes gave him a ghostly aspect. The paunch in his jumper--he only now realized he'd fallen asleep still partly in costume--was alarming. On the dresser in this image's foreground there cluttered make-up and brushes, scraps of wardrobe, notes, a half-eaten Soybar, a massive black dildo, a pair of masks, old show programs, unidentifiable things, yellow prescription bottles, something half consumed by fire; all piled there like temple offerings to his living portrait. He sighed.
"I'm taking a walk." He pulled a moth-eaten raccoon coat out from under a pile.
His cigarette was lit before the door closed behind him.
"Danny Boy!" A cowboy in chaps practicing with a lasso hailed him from across the muddy lane separating the rows of trailers.
"Morning, Tex." He waved. "Taking a walk."
The cowboy smiled and nodded. Danny started out as if he had a destination. He passed a surfer in a bathrobe loading beach scene props onto a cart. Most of the performers hadn't stirred from their trailers. A stray cat skittered past ahead of him. A light fog lingered beneath an overcast sky. He liked when the camp was still asleep, when he could imagine they were anybody, anywhere.
The big tent occupied a slight hollow where the fog lingered, lapping at its edges. The pennants on its peaks hung damply limp. Its slanting support ropes vanished into the mist on the ground where he could see one or two figures moving about. It looked smaller than when he first saw it years ago.
"There's a system." The man who would become Danny's predecessor had said. "We open with a short stand-up routine. Standard white-joke genre, lots of self-deprecation--do you know what that means?"
Danny nodded, lying.
"A little sexual inferiority here, a little intellectual inferiority there. It sets the tone." He spoke without enthusiasm. Danny's stomach growled. He had been promised a meal.
"Then there's a skit. We have five basic skits; one is the historical skit, involving a figure from US history. He's a bumbling conniver, saved from some ill-fated and corrupt scheme by his dependent slaves or servants. It usually features his cuckolding by one or more of them. Sometimes he is hauled off by the Indians."
Danny was barely paying attention now. He wanted to sit; his sore feet felt as if they were melting into flattening blobs like putty on a hot sidewalk.
"We finish with a song and dance. Don't worry, you don't have to know how to dance. If you're called on to dance it's to dance badly, because that's the idea. You don't know how to dance, right?"
"Right." Said Danny.
"Good." He looked Danny up and down. "You'll have to learn some basic pratfalls, nothing serious. Have you done any stunts?"
"No." Danny said apologetically.
"Yeah, well, that's okay. Normally I wouldn't take on someone without experience but," he nodded at Danny's red hair "a genuine ginger is a real rarity nowadays. Do you know your guys are like two percent of the under-30 population? A dying breed." He nodded; his tone was complimentary. "So what do you say?"
Danny's stomach contracted painfully. Over the man's shoulder he could just make out the lines of smoke rising from the homeless camp in a stand of sickly cedars nearby. He remembered a pact he'd made some hungry miles before, on a hungover first day of 2040; with a twinge he determined to forget it.
"Yes."
Danny frowned at the silent room.
"Bastards."
John's chin nestled neatly into his wattles as he squinted at the wig he was turning about in his lap.
"I haven't." He managed, somehow, through the tiered mass of compressed flesh.
Eddie, sewing a pair of lederhosen, grunted negative through teeth holding a thread tight.
Danny glimpsed himself in the old burlesque mirror. The white greasepaint left behind in the crevices around his eyes gave him a ghostly aspect. The paunch in his jumper--he only now realized he'd fallen asleep still partly in costume--was alarming. On the dresser in this image's foreground there cluttered make-up and brushes, scraps of wardrobe, notes, a half-eaten Soybar, a massive black dildo, a pair of masks, old show programs, unidentifiable things, yellow prescription bottles, something half consumed by fire; all piled there like temple offerings to his living portrait. He sighed.
"I'm taking a walk." He pulled a moth-eaten raccoon coat out from under a pile.
His cigarette was lit before the door closed behind him.
"Danny Boy!" A cowboy in chaps practicing with a lasso hailed him from across the muddy lane separating the rows of trailers.
"Morning, Tex." He waved. "Taking a walk."
The cowboy smiled and nodded. Danny started out as if he had a destination. He passed a surfer in a bathrobe loading beach scene props onto a cart. Most of the performers hadn't stirred from their trailers. A stray cat skittered past ahead of him. A light fog lingered beneath an overcast sky. He liked when the camp was still asleep, when he could imagine they were anybody, anywhere.
The big tent occupied a slight hollow where the fog lingered, lapping at its edges. The pennants on its peaks hung damply limp. Its slanting support ropes vanished into the mist on the ground where he could see one or two figures moving about. It looked smaller than when he first saw it years ago.
"There's a system." The man who would become Danny's predecessor had said. "We open with a short stand-up routine. Standard white-joke genre, lots of self-deprecation--do you know what that means?"
Danny nodded, lying.
"A little sexual inferiority here, a little intellectual inferiority there. It sets the tone." He spoke without enthusiasm. Danny's stomach growled. He had been promised a meal.
"Then there's a skit. We have five basic skits; one is the historical skit, involving a figure from US history. He's a bumbling conniver, saved from some ill-fated and corrupt scheme by his dependent slaves or servants. It usually features his cuckolding by one or more of them. Sometimes he is hauled off by the Indians."
Danny was barely paying attention now. He wanted to sit; his sore feet felt as if they were melting into flattening blobs like putty on a hot sidewalk.
"We finish with a song and dance. Don't worry, you don't have to know how to dance. If you're called on to dance it's to dance badly, because that's the idea. You don't know how to dance, right?"
"Right." Said Danny.
"Good." He looked Danny up and down. "You'll have to learn some basic pratfalls, nothing serious. Have you done any stunts?"
"No." Danny said apologetically.
"Yeah, well, that's okay. Normally I wouldn't take on someone without experience but," he nodded at Danny's red hair "a genuine ginger is a real rarity nowadays. Do you know your guys are like two percent of the under-30 population? A dying breed." He nodded; his tone was complimentary. "So what do you say?"
Danny's stomach contracted painfully. Over the man's shoulder he could just make out the lines of smoke rising from the homeless camp in a stand of sickly cedars nearby. He remembered a pact he'd made some hungry miles before, on a hungover first day of 2040; with a twinge he determined to forget it.
"Yes."
Saturday, March 16, 2019
The Christchurch Shooter's Manifesto
Reading the Christchurch shooter's manifesto (at 14:30). I missed all the 4chan references in this first reading. His actions lend credence to his claim he intends to speed up a civil war, and he isn't trolling anyone about demographic displacement because he isn't lying about demographic displacement; most of the rest of the manifesto is trolling. From the obvious, Candace Owens is too extreme! to, I think, a troll to the right, by paraphrasing the white nationalist "14 words" without citation. I wonder if here he's not trying to encourage conspiracy theorists.
By bringing the message board memes and shitposting directly into a manifesto attached to fifty dead innocents the killer's best shot at accelerating things is in the area of censorship.
Here's the Serbian war video he's said to have played before the massacre:
The YouTube channel posting this updated its description:
Our thoughts are with the victims of the terrorist attack in New Zealand.Here's another good one:
This song is not about nor does it condone killing innocent civilians. Made during the chaotic civil war of the former Yugoslavia it was meant as morale boosting song for the Serbian defence, with references to Croatian UstaĊĦa, who not more than half a century prior to this committed horrific crimes against the Serbian people, together with their Muslim allies.
Hundreds of similar war-time songs were made by all sides and this one is nothing special. This channel has an equal amount of videos made by muslims as made by Serbs, with the primary goal being the historic value.
Thursday, March 14, 2019
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Negative Outcomes, Negative Income
Andrew Yang is a Democrat campaigning for president with a universal basic income as his central policy plank. He likes to cite a similar plan passing the House years ago.
President Richard Nixon's 1969 Family Assistance Plan (FAP), replacing AFDC with a guaranteed income, passed a full vote in the House in 1970 before dying in the Senate Finance Committee.
Moynihan sold Nixon on the policy, a version of Milton Friedman's "negative income tax"
Nixon's FAP might have put the then exploding class of race hustlers and welfare bureaucrats out of business early on. This appealed to Nixon, eager to address public outrage over the rapidly expanding welfare state. But it's notable it also must have affected the liberal Moynihan's thinking. By the close of the sixties, after having worked for Lyndon Johnson to implement the Great Society, he came to see the burgeoning civil rights industry as a mortal threat to the Union.
His role in the Nixon White House as adviser to the President with cabinet rank was approvingly described by John Ehrlichman in his Witness to Power as "the President's counselor and resident thinker..." there "...to rove from subject to subject as he wished, stimulating our intellects and crying alarms."
His 1965 Report on the Negro Family will live on in increased infamy for calling out black illegitimacy, but it was a memo four years--four years of expanding welfare rolls, black violence and race-hustling--later, solicited by President-elect Nixon, that suggests a growing disillusion with black potential that may have influenced his thinking regarding basic income
Nixon might be now considered a liberal Republican--note here how he accepts the logic of school integration and boasts of increasing it in the South--if not for the mutual disdain with which he and the Eastern liberal elite held each other. Perhaps he and Moynihan saw eye-to-eye because of their shared working class origins.
I assert Pat Moynihan's enthusiasm for a universal income tax was influenced by his lack of enthusiasm for black America's human capital. He wanted to "dissolve" poverty not just to help the poor, but to take away this nuclear fuel rod of perpetual demagogy, powering our now stifling diversity state (the metaphorical uranium here isn't just black poverty but black crime and general misery, which is a neat trick).
His grim prospect was realized. Another grim prospect--automation--resurrects his idea. But could a guaranteed income--replacing AFDC, for starters--have some beneficial effect in gutting the Diversity hustle?
I don't know if it's a good idea, but it's an idea whose time has come.
President Richard Nixon's 1969 Family Assistance Plan (FAP), replacing AFDC with a guaranteed income, passed a full vote in the House in 1970 before dying in the Senate Finance Committee.
Moynihan sold Nixon on the policy, a version of Milton Friedman's "negative income tax"
Nixon's FAP might have put the then exploding class of race hustlers and welfare bureaucrats out of business early on. This appealed to Nixon, eager to address public outrage over the rapidly expanding welfare state. But it's notable it also must have affected the liberal Moynihan's thinking. By the close of the sixties, after having worked for Lyndon Johnson to implement the Great Society, he came to see the burgeoning civil rights industry as a mortal threat to the Union.
His role in the Nixon White House as adviser to the President with cabinet rank was approvingly described by John Ehrlichman in his Witness to Power as "the President's counselor and resident thinker..." there "...to rove from subject to subject as he wished, stimulating our intellects and crying alarms."
His 1965 Report on the Negro Family will live on in increased infamy for calling out black illegitimacy, but it was a memo four years--four years of expanding welfare rolls, black violence and race-hustling--later, solicited by President-elect Nixon, that suggests a growing disillusion with black potential that may have influenced his thinking regarding basic income
Two weeks before his inauguration Nixon had asked Moynihan to "sit back" about once a month and give him a general view of a particular area of public policy. On March 19, Moynihan dispatched a 28-page "Report to the President" on the state of race relations. In it he pictured the Nixon presidency as a turning point between stark alternative futures. One was grim: a "calamitous interlude during which the incapacity of 'middle America' to govern was once and for all established." The other was glowing: a Nixon administration that was "an extraordinary and wholly unexpected success out of which grew the miraculous disappearance of race as a central problem of American life."
Moynihan found some encouraging evidence for the latter possibility in recent black gains in income and education. But hidden behind the race problem, he warned, was a class problem. That is, there was no longer a black community in America, there were two. The black poor was a too well known entity--heavily southern in their crippling pathology, abnormally dependent, demographically under siege, unusually self-damaging in their behavior, soaring toward a rate of illegitimacy that was approaching half of all black births. Their level of educational achievement was appalling, but the topic was "extremely sensitive."
Black apologists and white ideologues attempted to explain away this crippling learning gap as entirely the product of external discrimination and suppression. But, as Moynihan cautioned, "the facts would seem to be otherwise." Recent research in urban IQ decline had showed an alarming trend: "a Negro intelligence distribution sharply skewed toward incompetence."
Moynihan alluded to the work of Arthur R. Jensen of Berkeley, which he'd had recently shared with the President, and with whom he was then in correspondence in a collegially courteous but substantively noncommittal fashion. Moynihan included a table showing that the percentage of Negro children with IQs under 75--the point of retardation--was 42.9 percent compared with 7.8 percent for whites in the lowest quintile of socio-economic class. In the two highest SES categories, the black-white ratio in retardation was a devastating 13.6 to 1.
Moynihan acknowledged the recent scholarly revival, "in impeccably respectable circles," of genetic explanations for these persistent racial discrepancies. He volunteered his own opinion that "I personally simply do not believe this is so." But he acknowledged that as a matter of scientific dispute in light of divided evidence, "it is an open question."Moynihan identified the crisis of a black middle class--much of it employed in the race hustle and paid by government--using black urban terror as a bludgeon and means of looting the system.
"The chief danger of this situation, to Moynihan, was that a politicized and violent negro poor have given the black middle class an incomparable weapon with which to threaten white America." This had been "an altogether intoxicating experience," because the rising black middle class had created a new caste problem, a psychological demand for "equality of self valuation." Behind the courteous optimism of the black middle class lay "volcanoes of hate and rage"--including self-hate as much as anything." Thus the existence of a dependent, alienated, black urban lower class "has at last given the black middle class an opportunity to establish a secure and rewarding power base in American society--as a provider of social services to the black lower class....
"The era of equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, integration and such," Moynihan concluded, "is coming to an end. But Moynihan seemed to be of two minds about this. in the universities, he said, there "is no trued Negro intellectual or academic class at this moment. (Thirty years ago there was: somehow it died out.)" Books by black authors were "poor stuff for the most part," and the new Black Studies programs tended toward "the worst kid of ethnic-longings-for-a-glorious past."Wakanda! Moynihan had a vision--good for him he had no idea how bad it would get--of our world. He's only deficient or maybe just discreet in calling out only the black class of race-hustlers, arguably then, but undeniably now less important than their Jewish allies.
The logic of these distortions was relentless: "before long blacks will be demanding Eleven Percent of all public places and services--in universities, civil services, legislatures, military academies, embassies, judges. This is not what the civil rights movement expected to come about, or hoped to see, but it does appear to be the outcome nonetheless ." On the other hand, given his own impeccably Irish, Hell's Kitchen credentials, Moynihan historically observed: "What building contracts and police graft were to the 19th century Irish, the welfare departments, Head Start programs, and Black Studies programs will be to the coming generation of Negroes. They are of course very wise in this respect. These are expanding areas of economic opportunity. By contrast, black business enterprise offers relatively little."
Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era, Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972Moynihan doesn't mention it here, but part and parcel of this process was black violence. Throughout the sixties black rioting drove policy. Programs were devised and rushed into law or perpetuated explicitly to mollify black rage, with increased urgency each time summer rolled around:
In contrast, OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] liberal supporters saw its program as relieving social frustration before it exploded into disorder. A 1965 memo from OEO head [Sargent] Shriver to [President] Johnson noted “that the most significant single thing combating potential riots this summer is your war against poverty.”
A summer 1965 letter from NYC Mayor Robert F. Wagner to Johnson stressed that a threatened Neighborhood Youth Corps fund cut “could result in explosive consequences.”
A December 1966 memo from Vice President Hubert Humphrey urged Johnson to restore proposed OEO cuts since “local officials are desperately afraid of what is going to happen this summer.
A February 1968 memo from Shriver asked Johnson for a supplementary appropriation because “there is much more which could be done to ease tensions and at the same time provide hope and justice for the millions who will be seething in the cities.”
Emergence and Defeat of Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP); Neuberger, Leland G., Boston UniversityI suspect Moynihan had lost faith in blacks' ability to raise themselves out of poverty, as had Nixon, leading to their frankly bold and innovative policy proposal. In this recording of the two talking about the dread Race and IQ problem that surfaced a couple of years ago Moynihan mentions his Family Assistance Plan:
Conservative Republicans finally killed the FAP in the Senate but Moynihan blames the liberal race hustlers for its ultimate death.
Nixon might be now considered a liberal Republican--note here how he accepts the logic of school integration and boasts of increasing it in the South--if not for the mutual disdain with which he and the Eastern liberal elite held each other. Perhaps he and Moynihan saw eye-to-eye because of their shared working class origins.
I assert Pat Moynihan's enthusiasm for a universal income tax was influenced by his lack of enthusiasm for black America's human capital. He wanted to "dissolve" poverty not just to help the poor, but to take away this nuclear fuel rod of perpetual demagogy, powering our now stifling diversity state (the metaphorical uranium here isn't just black poverty but black crime and general misery, which is a neat trick).
His grim prospect was realized. Another grim prospect--automation--resurrects his idea. But could a guaranteed income--replacing AFDC, for starters--have some beneficial effect in gutting the Diversity hustle?
I don't know if it's a good idea, but it's an idea whose time has come.
Tuesday, March 05, 2019
The Golden Years
"You could get a coach."
"I don't know. I heard most of those guys actually work for the Inclusivity Commission."
"My sister got one for her father-in-law." Mark waited as a woman passed. "She isn't sure it helped, but he did great in the interview and he's still at home."
James shrugged slightly.
"I don't know. Grandpa's really old; he goes all the way back to the Twentieth Century. They expect to find something. If he just gives them all the right answers they'll be suspicious."
Mark nodded.
"That's what the coach told us. What they want to see with someone in their eighties or older is that he's made what they call 'the Journey'; he needs to tell them how he overcame his supremacist upbringing. He knows to say he's been involved in activism of some sort or another, right?"
"Yeah. Still. I hear they're actually investigating that stuff out now." James replied glumly. "They're checking everything since that law passed last year giving the Commission unlimited funding. You can't just say you marched with so-and-so." James sighed. "I just wish he was more concerned about it himself. He doesn't seem to care. You should hear him at home. He makes no attempt to regulate what he says. He actually enjoys speaking against love-truth."
Mark chortled a little at the phrase. James continued.
"He thinks it's all a joke. I try to impress upon him..."
"Does he realize what can happen? He's not, you know, losing it...?"
"No. If only." They both laughed. "Maybe he'd be more pliable. No, he's mentally as sharp as ever. But emotionally, he's like a child. He's..." James searched for the word, "...he's defiant."
"So why the interview? What did he do--what did he say?"
"I don't know. They won't tell you. Just..." James looked both ways "...that awful language. What did the notice say? '...comments denigrating a protected class...' they won't say who. But the part at the end, something about how he might be a bad influence on 'any minor children with whom he has unsupervised contact', you know, that being the kids, his grandchildren."
"How is he getting along with them?"
"They love him. And Jack, you know, is just like him, he even looks a lot like him, but I think he thinks more like him than anything..."
"Watch that."
"I know. He's smart, you know, and he's getting old enough he knows how to keep his mouth shut at school. Hell, he knows better than me how to play the game. He's been helpful with Dad. But when he and the old guy get together, especially when they go over this stuff, they always end up sharing jokes about how absurd they think it is. It's funny, you know..."
"What?"
"That I'm so proud of him, and proud of the old man, for their smarts and defiance, and it's going to get Dad shunted off to a Home and a regimen of mind-numbing drugs and, if we're not careful, is going to get Jack black-listed on google-employment, drawing a basic income check, and still having to regulate his behavior all the more to keep it."
"No joke. I know a guy who lost his UBI because he asked a girl out on a date."
"It sucks. I was watching them together the other night. I should have been proud, watching my dad and my son, Jack is so handsome now, just a little man, you know, and there's dad, doing what people have always done, or used to do until modern times I guess, he's passing along knowledge, and he'll be gone soon and Jack will eventually be old and passing along what he's learned--probably not, though, seeing as most kids now won't have their own kids. I was moved by the sight of them together. But the idea of them taking the old guy away...I swear I had to leave the room so Sarah wouldn't see me getting emotional."
"The last thing you want to do is get emotional. You're not just trying to keep your dad at home now. You're saving Jack too. God forbid he should just give up and accept the UBI dole. He is a smart kid, and he's got character. No, don't let him get a taste for the truth now, it'll all be over for him before he gets started."
"I know. He knows, he understands. But sometimes I think he doesn't care. It's scary. Sometimes I fear he'll be one of these guys who just checks out because he can't or won't play the game. I have a hard time imagining the old man doing it, doing what we've been doing, what we are doing."
"What are we doing?"
James stopped in his tracks.
"Yeah. What the hell are we doing, Mark?"
"I don't know. I heard most of those guys actually work for the Inclusivity Commission."
"My sister got one for her father-in-law." Mark waited as a woman passed. "She isn't sure it helped, but he did great in the interview and he's still at home."
James shrugged slightly.
"I don't know. Grandpa's really old; he goes all the way back to the Twentieth Century. They expect to find something. If he just gives them all the right answers they'll be suspicious."
Mark nodded.
"That's what the coach told us. What they want to see with someone in their eighties or older is that he's made what they call 'the Journey'; he needs to tell them how he overcame his supremacist upbringing. He knows to say he's been involved in activism of some sort or another, right?"
"Yeah. Still. I hear they're actually investigating that stuff out now." James replied glumly. "They're checking everything since that law passed last year giving the Commission unlimited funding. You can't just say you marched with so-and-so." James sighed. "I just wish he was more concerned about it himself. He doesn't seem to care. You should hear him at home. He makes no attempt to regulate what he says. He actually enjoys speaking against love-truth."
Mark chortled a little at the phrase. James continued.
"He thinks it's all a joke. I try to impress upon him..."
"Does he realize what can happen? He's not, you know, losing it...?"
"No. If only." They both laughed. "Maybe he'd be more pliable. No, he's mentally as sharp as ever. But emotionally, he's like a child. He's..." James searched for the word, "...he's defiant."
"So why the interview? What did he do--what did he say?"
"I don't know. They won't tell you. Just..." James looked both ways "...that awful language. What did the notice say? '...comments denigrating a protected class...' they won't say who. But the part at the end, something about how he might be a bad influence on 'any minor children with whom he has unsupervised contact', you know, that being the kids, his grandchildren."
"How is he getting along with them?"
"They love him. And Jack, you know, is just like him, he even looks a lot like him, but I think he thinks more like him than anything..."
"Watch that."
"I know. He's smart, you know, and he's getting old enough he knows how to keep his mouth shut at school. Hell, he knows better than me how to play the game. He's been helpful with Dad. But when he and the old guy get together, especially when they go over this stuff, they always end up sharing jokes about how absurd they think it is. It's funny, you know..."
"What?"
"That I'm so proud of him, and proud of the old man, for their smarts and defiance, and it's going to get Dad shunted off to a Home and a regimen of mind-numbing drugs and, if we're not careful, is going to get Jack black-listed on google-employment, drawing a basic income check, and still having to regulate his behavior all the more to keep it."
"No joke. I know a guy who lost his UBI because he asked a girl out on a date."
"It sucks. I was watching them together the other night. I should have been proud, watching my dad and my son, Jack is so handsome now, just a little man, you know, and there's dad, doing what people have always done, or used to do until modern times I guess, he's passing along knowledge, and he'll be gone soon and Jack will eventually be old and passing along what he's learned--probably not, though, seeing as most kids now won't have their own kids. I was moved by the sight of them together. But the idea of them taking the old guy away...I swear I had to leave the room so Sarah wouldn't see me getting emotional."
"The last thing you want to do is get emotional. You're not just trying to keep your dad at home now. You're saving Jack too. God forbid he should just give up and accept the UBI dole. He is a smart kid, and he's got character. No, don't let him get a taste for the truth now, it'll all be over for him before he gets started."
"I know. He knows, he understands. But sometimes I think he doesn't care. It's scary. Sometimes I fear he'll be one of these guys who just checks out because he can't or won't play the game. I have a hard time imagining the old man doing it, doing what we've been doing, what we are doing."
"What are we doing?"
James stopped in his tracks.
"Yeah. What the hell are we doing, Mark?"
Sunday, March 03, 2019
Credulity and Culpability
The real scandal of hate hoaxes is not in their creation but in their reception by a biased, propagandizing media, which is often where the real subterfuge takes place.
Indeed, in the current environment it's a distinct advantage if the hoax has no single, deliberate author, such as the bumbling Jussie Smollett, to screw things up and reveal the lie. It's a far more durable hoax that's perpetuated by silent assent, or, better still, by ignorant true-believers projecting their bias.
In the case of the Covington Catholic kids the media coverage was the hoax. Which isn't to say the coverage wasn't conspiratorial and coordinated, just that no one has to be led. Suggestion is all the direction the msm needed. Recall how quickly and widely the now iconic images of the Smirk were paired with photos of white southerners harassing blacks at segregated lunch counters on Twitter.
This was another favorite.
Those tweets came and went (and most or all of them seem to have been deleted) without a single author, probably, seeing the irony--the facts revealed the case was actually a group of whites being harassed with the intent of driving them out of a public space.
The Covington kids were immediately inserted into the narrative as the heirs to the long-crafted southern white racist role. To understand the past is to understand the present, they say, but in reality the present reveals more about the past, and those white southerners opposing integration look less and less irrational.
The standard practice of invoking images of the past, police dogs and fire hoses, to cow the masses in the present is rapidly losing potency. Anyone who's endured a public space ruined by blacks has to wonder at some point if the segregationists weren't right all along.
Other major controversies not recognized as scams played out precisely the same way. The Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown controversies are crowd-sourced hoaxes just like the Covington Boys fiasco, persisting still among the gullible simply because the evidence refuting them isn't on video.
They are the components of the broader hoax that is Black Lives Matter, and the parts represent the whole: they are a mixture of silent acquiescence, deliberate misrepresentation and, probably most of all, boundless credulity. This pathological credulity is a constant in our society now.
At the individual level one is relieved of guilt, even if the precepts of the hoax are absurd, if he just doesn't question any of it. The moment he expresses doubt publicly he reveals himself as aware and capable of making a moral and ethical judgement. If he doesn't, if he just keeps any doubts he has shut tight inside, he can't be held accountable. Moral culpability is transferred to the group, over which he has no control.
High profile hate hoaxes are merely extreme cases exposing the level of biased credulity and media misinformation that is a constant. When your media exists in such a state of collective psychosis, everything is fraudulent. In their hands everything becomes a hoax.
If you're a fraudster, all you have to do is con this gullible band, and they will in turn con the masses, their credulity lending it the appearance of veracity.
Here's an expose in Gizmodo revealing how it works:
Sendler's articles were crafted to humor the narrative and social justice conceits along with the salacious.
The exposure of such charlatans won't shame progressive publications into objectivity--they still very much want the snake oil, they just want respectable salesmen. Having completely debunked Sendler's credibility, the article ends by falling for one more con from Sendler, and for the same reason, because the author finds it irresistible.
A perfect ending from a literary perspective, and there must be a name for the trope, when a protagonist overcomes something only to fall for it all over again in another guise and we learn that Nothing Has Changed.
I'm reminded of the end of the film Devil's Advocate
Vanity will keep the narrative in business for a long time still.
Indeed, in the current environment it's a distinct advantage if the hoax has no single, deliberate author, such as the bumbling Jussie Smollett, to screw things up and reveal the lie. It's a far more durable hoax that's perpetuated by silent assent, or, better still, by ignorant true-believers projecting their bias.
In the case of the Covington Catholic kids the media coverage was the hoax. Which isn't to say the coverage wasn't conspiratorial and coordinated, just that no one has to be led. Suggestion is all the direction the msm needed. Recall how quickly and widely the now iconic images of the Smirk were paired with photos of white southerners harassing blacks at segregated lunch counters on Twitter.
This was another favorite.
Those tweets came and went (and most or all of them seem to have been deleted) without a single author, probably, seeing the irony--the facts revealed the case was actually a group of whites being harassed with the intent of driving them out of a public space.
The Covington kids were immediately inserted into the narrative as the heirs to the long-crafted southern white racist role. To understand the past is to understand the present, they say, but in reality the present reveals more about the past, and those white southerners opposing integration look less and less irrational.
The standard practice of invoking images of the past, police dogs and fire hoses, to cow the masses in the present is rapidly losing potency. Anyone who's endured a public space ruined by blacks has to wonder at some point if the segregationists weren't right all along.
Other major controversies not recognized as scams played out precisely the same way. The Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown controversies are crowd-sourced hoaxes just like the Covington Boys fiasco, persisting still among the gullible simply because the evidence refuting them isn't on video.
They are the components of the broader hoax that is Black Lives Matter, and the parts represent the whole: they are a mixture of silent acquiescence, deliberate misrepresentation and, probably most of all, boundless credulity. This pathological credulity is a constant in our society now.
At the individual level one is relieved of guilt, even if the precepts of the hoax are absurd, if he just doesn't question any of it. The moment he expresses doubt publicly he reveals himself as aware and capable of making a moral and ethical judgement. If he doesn't, if he just keeps any doubts he has shut tight inside, he can't be held accountable. Moral culpability is transferred to the group, over which he has no control.
High profile hate hoaxes are merely extreme cases exposing the level of biased credulity and media misinformation that is a constant. When your media exists in such a state of collective psychosis, everything is fraudulent. In their hands everything becomes a hoax.
If you're a fraudster, all you have to do is con this gullible band, and they will in turn con the masses, their credulity lending it the appearance of veracity.
Here's an expose in Gizmodo revealing how it works:
If you look up Dr. Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler online, you might think he has a MD and a PhD from Harvard Medical School. He presents himself as the chief of sexology at a non-profit health research foundation based in New York. His website states he’s one of the youngest elected members of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, and that Barack Obama gave him a President’s Gold Service Award for his contributions in medicine and mental health.Sendler seems to have found his niche in the realm of Vice click-bait and "sex positive" scammery as represented by Dan Savage, whose reaction to being called out by the author is a veritable portrait of gay narcissism.
Based on the information available online, Sendler could be one of the most accomplished 28-year-olds in medicine.
But he’s not. Those are all lies.
Sendler is a serial fabulist. The accomplished doctor character Sendler has created has appeared in numerous media outlets—Vice, Playboy, Savage Lovecast, Huffington Post, Insider, Bustle, Thrive Global, Women’s Health, and Forbes, among others. Many of these platforms have published Sendler’s lies and publicized his bizarre and irresponsible studies on necrophilia, zoophilia, lethal erotic asphyxiation, and sexual assault. And until recently, he was soliciting patients through his website where he offered online psychotherapy and sex therapy.
I had called Savage to ask how Sendler ended up on his show, but Savage quickly turned introspective about the episode. “I’m really annoyed by this—having been duped and exploited like this in this con,” Savage told me. “This is so disappointing. A lot of the people in the sex research community trust me because I try to handle what they are handing me responsibly. Letting down sex researchers is going to mean I have to get super [humble] tonight and lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a couple hours.”It's worth noting the only real problem people have with Sendler is his dishonest resume. One can call oneself an "expert" on social justice or sex without a meaningful degree--Savage's claim to expertise is that he's sexually degenerate.
Sendler's articles were crafted to humor the narrative and social justice conceits along with the salacious.
Vice’s article “Meet the Man Studying Why Some People Are Attracted to Animals” features a Q-and-A with Sendler. The writer presents Sendler as a transgressive scientific visionary. “While the online world has allowed us to have a nuanced discussion about an immense variety of kinks, consent, and the spectrum of sexuality, the urge to fuck animals is one impulse that’s pretty off-limits—even in the scientific community,” the reporter writes. “Dr. Damian Sendler, a forensic sexologist and research scientist, is one of the few people in the world attempting to change that.”If Sendler hadn't faked his resume none of this would raise an eyebrow, and it's hard not to suspect much of what passes for sex research is no more solid than his social justice porn, it just comes from ostensibly respectable sources.
The exposure of such charlatans won't shame progressive publications into objectivity--they still very much want the snake oil, they just want respectable salesmen. Having completely debunked Sendler's credibility, the article ends by falling for one more con from Sendler, and for the same reason, because the author finds it irresistible.
As his diatribe continued, Sendler helped me realize why people like him believe they can get away with falsifying their entire career and lying to vulnerable people.It's all Drumpf's fault!
“You have to understand that in the world where people use—even the President of this country uses Twitter and creates falsehoods every day,” Sendler said. “How do we then quantify the degree of guilt that you can do, right? Because, you see, if the most powerful man can do this eight, nine thousand times... and he doesn’t care. He still does his thing, and people still support him because they believe in the agenda that he executes.”
He is right, in this case. If someone can inflate their business accomplishments for years, then become a world leader who rules by sowing chaos with constant distortion—what’s to stop a confident, charismatic serial liar from manifesting a psychological career and being treated like a medical luminary?
“Sometimes it really matters how you can sell things and convince people,” Sendler told me, moments before he left my office. “Reality is inflatable and everything is part of the game.
A perfect ending from a literary perspective, and there must be a name for the trope, when a protagonist overcomes something only to fall for it all over again in another guise and we learn that Nothing Has Changed.
I'm reminded of the end of the film Devil's Advocate
Vanity will keep the narrative in business for a long time still.
Friday, March 01, 2019
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"Antifascist" demonstration Portland, Oregon. August 17, 2019. The two sides squared off across a field, defined by police cord...
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Another six hours monitoring livestreams last night. Courtesy of: AustinZone LiveNow Media JacobSnakeUp